


Interlude: The Attic

by Dragongoddess13



Series: Ghost Whisperer AU [2]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Ghost Whisperer AU, Male-Female Friendship, Slice of Life, a day in the life, growing relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:08:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23988625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragongoddess13/pseuds/Dragongoddess13
Summary: Gendry can't stand the idea of going to work on gloomy wet morning, so instead he calls off and spend the day with the woman whose made his life rather interesting as of late.A slice of life/Day in the Life of a burgeoning Gendrya friends to Lovers Relationship.
Relationships: Arya Stark/Gendry Waters
Series: Ghost Whisperer AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1715362
Comments: 17
Kudos: 149





	Interlude: The Attic

**Author's Note:**

> So as it says in the summary this is more of a slice of life, typical day spent together, story. It's meant to display the growing friendship between them and set the stage for what will eventually turn into a romance.   
> I woke up this morning and realized there was a distinct lack explanation as to how they had become friends in the next story, so here is a little interlude to hold you over while I finish up the next story.   
> The next story is already planned and started, just gotta get it finished.

Interlude: The Attic

xXx

Arya stands in the doorway, confusion playing across her face. “Don’t you have to work today?” she asks, though it doesn’t stop her from stepping aside so he can enter. 

“I took a personal day.” Gendry tells her, slipping off his light jacket and dropping it on the hook by the door. Such a simple movement, but the action is extremely presumptuous and he thinks perhaps this is all the proof he needs that the last few months spent near her have shaped their acquaintanceship into a friendship of sorts. 

It’s early March, still chilly, though it’s beginning to warm slowly, day by day. Gendry does not like the cold, he was a southern boy, born and bred. Give him humidity and unerring sun any day. So, when he woke up this morning to see the grey and the late winter drizzle, he had felt a deep dread settle into his bones. He had a lot of work to do and very little desire to do it. So he cashed in a personal day, put on an old pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and drove over to Arya’s house, determined to make something interesting out of the day. 

She was dressed in old overalls covered in paint stains and sneakers, a baseball cap sitting backwards on her head. When she turns around he’s certain it’ll hold the logo for the Wintertown Direwolves on it. There’s dirt on her hands and under her fingernails and a small smudge of it on her cheek. 

“Is everything alright?” she asks, leading him back to the sun porch. They’d finished it nearly a month prior and while Arya waited for summer furniture to go on sale, she was currently using it as a nursery for the plants she was preparing for summer transplant into what would be her garden. 

She gets down on her knees beside a pot that’s almost as big as she is, sticking her hands in the dirt and kneading it up around a small japanese maple sapling. 

“Quite frankly I had absolutely no desire to spend another day locked in an interrogation room with that woman, especially not since she’s finally agreed to legal representation.” he tells her, rolling his eyes. 

“So you thought you’d stop by and get your hands dirty instead?”

“Something like that. I remember you said something about working on the attic this week and I thought I’d stop in and see if you needed any help.” 

“Sure, I’m headed up there as soon as I finish with these.” she explains, shaking the dirt from her hands over the pot. She turns and grabs another, much smaller pot, filling it with soil and then carefully planting seeds in the center. 

“What is this one?” he asks. 

“Tomatoes. And that one is going to be peppers. That one there is carrots and then that one is onions.” she points out each successive pot, all but one already filled and seeded. “I’ve ordered a pear tree and an apple tree from the local nursery; the rest will all be flowers.” she explains. 

“Quite the green thumb.” he tells her and she grins. 

“It was one of my favorite things to do growing up. My mother hated it, said it wasn’t ladylike playing in the dirt and all that, but I just loved it, no one could stop me, I’d always find a way.” she laughs. “The gardener for my family's estate used to teach me, even when my mum got mad at him. He actually sent me these seeds. They're from the northern crop.” 

“You aren’t really like any of those other rich girls.” he teases. Arya looks up at him, grinning slyly.

“How would you know? You don’t know any other rich girls.” 

He laughs. “Touche.” 

He watches her finish up and then helps her set the pots out of the way along the walls under the windows. They won’t get much sun today, but the weather should be clearing up soon and then they can go outside. 

“Have you decided on anything for the outside of the house yet?” he asks as she leads the way up to the second floor. 

“I really want to paint the house a jewel tone, but I’m waiting for the zoning commision to get back to me to confirm that I can.” 

“That oughta look sharp,” he tells her, “Especially with all the other work you plan on doing.” 

She hums. “I had a contractor evaluate the porch and I ordered all the material he said I would need. Once the weather clears up for more than a day I can start rebuilding the porch.”

“By yourself?” he asks. 

“Sure, unless of course a certain Detective Sergeant has a day off in the near future.” 

Gendry chuckles. “I’m sure I could find the time. For the right price of course.” 

Arya smiles, peeking over her shoulder at him. “A home cooked meal and beer?”

“Sold.” he says, as they stop outside the door at the top of the stairs. She opens it, reaching in and flipping on the light against the wall. The stairs up into the attic are dirty and narrow, covered in a thick layer of dust you can leave shoe prints in as you ascend. The banister at the top creeks as he puts his hand on it, wiggling loose in the sockets on the floor. “This just going to be storage?” he asks. 

“Probably?” she shrugs, surveying the massive stacks of boxes. She turns and points to the far end of the room. “All that over there came with the house.” 

It looks like it too. The boxes stacked at the other end of the room are old and covered in dark stains. The writing on the outside of some of them has faded away and several have buckled under the weight of the ones on top. 

“Start there?” he asks. She nods, slipping on the old work gloves she brought up in her pocket. He does the same and carefully, they systematically pull boxes off the stacks from the top down, setting them in rows along the floor near the stairs. 

“I never understood how anyone could just leave anything like this behind.” he says sometime later. They’ve piled all the boxes into the dinning room and are picking through them. The first few were just old clothes, probably not much to salvage from them either, but the next few were filled with old photos and family momentos. “I would kill to have stuff like this.” he mutters it under his breath, more a comment to himself that he didn’t mean to say out loud. Thankfully, despite the look she gives him, Arya doesn’t ask about it. Just to be sure she doesn’t though, he continues; “This is the kind of stuff you need for the shadows, right?” 

“Assuming any of this belongs to any of them, yes.” she replies. She still has that look on her face, like someone has just slapped her, but she keeps whatever she’s thinking to herself. 

“How would you go about using any of this to help them?” he asks, finding himself genuinely interested in the process. It's strange. One minute he’s a skeptic, ready to point out every mistake to prove she’s a fraud and the next he’s a believer, even going so far as to want to learn more about it. 

“It’s kind of a slow process.” she tells him. “I’ll put this stuff out, let them see it again and if they have an emotional connection to it, it should draw them in, help them remember.” 

“And then what?” 

“Then, if they want to move on they can.” 

“Seems simple enough.” 

“It is actually. It’s very basic. Stuff like this, what you’ve seen me do, it’s barely scratching the surface of what the women in my family can do.” she smiles softly. “I once watched my great grandmother warn off an ornery spirit with a stern word and a glare.” 

“So you can fight them off?” 

She shrugs. “Sort of. It’s more like using your own life energy to counteract their spiritual energy. It’s an ancient art that ancient priestesses who worshiped the old gods learned. My family is descended from those priestesses.” she tells him. “But I don’t really practice the art myself. The deeper into you get the more dangerous it gets… and I have never had any interest in that. In fact, I’ve actively avoid anything but basic sight and sometimes I try to avoid that too.” 

xXx

Arya hasn’t spoken this much about her abilities since she was a child, explaining the rumors that surrounded her family to Lommy. She remembers worrying that he would leave, stop being her friend when he realized how different they were, but he didn’t, at least, not until her own abilities developed. He heard about the little girl in the park from Robb who had been discussing it with their mother at the time and slowly but surely, Lommy began to pull away, started avoiding her on the playground, in school. He was never actively mean to her, but he didn’t stand up for her against the bullies anymore and he certainly didn’t come to her when he knew she would need someone the most. 

It didn’t last very long, of course. It was probably a year before he realized how silly he had reacted to the entire situation. He’d even come to her one afternoon to beg her forgiveness, to tell her that he was sorry and he didn’t mean to hurt her, that he had missed her. She’d be lying if she said she didn’t kind of love him for that back then. To have someone she had trusted for so many years, pull away and then come back and tell her he had been wrong, to say all the things he had imagined him saying to her one day, it was… cathartic. She took him back and they were inseparable again. They even went to the same university, she premed and he fashion design. If Lommy had been interested in women, she thinks her mother may have pushed them together more. 

Lommy hasn’t been around for quite awhile now, though she’s certain it has nothing to do with choice and everything to do with her. She can’t blame him really, she wouldn’t want to be around her either, not while she’s caught wallowing in her own self pity. 

“What do you think?” she asks, drawing Gendry’s attention from the box he’s sorting through. He looks up, laughing as she strikes a pose. 

“Are those shoulder pads?” he asks, a grin splitting his face. 

“Yes they are.” she replies. The old blazer she’s slipped on is black and falls well past her hips, it could almost be a dress it’s so long. Colorful costume jewels have been sewn into the lapels in flowery patterns and the shoulders nearly double the width of her own. 

“I think you’re going to need to fumigate yourself for whatever deadly mold spores have grown on that thing.” he tells her, laughing as she wiggles her shoulders. 

“What have you found?” she asks, gesturing to the box in front of him. He’d pulled out an old jewelry box and had been going through it for the last hour.

“These pieces don’t look like costume jewelry.” he tells her. Arya slips off the blazer and tosses it back in one of the boxes as she moves to his side. “These here are real diamonds. And this one, I can’t say for sure, but I’m fairly certain that’s a canary diamond.” he explains. 

“You know a lot about this?” she asks. 

“I did a stint with the robbery homicide unit after I became a detective.” he tells her. “Lots of white collar crime, jewelry store thefts, things like that.” 

“Well you’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?” she teases. 

“Says the girl who can talk to the dead.” 

He holds up one of the pieces for her to see, a pendant with a single teardrop diamond. Woven around it are green vines inlaid with colorful stones. It brings to mind a raindrop woven around with vines and flowers. “It’s gorgeous. Anything in the box that says who owned all of this?” 

“Nothing so far.” he replies. “Try it on. It’s technically yours now.” 

She hesitates for only a moment before moving to the mirror that hangs behind the buffet in the far corner of the dining room. It takes only a moment to slip on, the chain in good condition despite where it’s been for an untold amount of time. She pulls aside the necklace she’s already wearing, the bleeding heart pendant Gendry gifted her for the solstice four months earlier, letting it sit alone. 

“It looks good on you.” he says, his reflection appearing in the mirror behind her. She smiles softly. 

“It looks like something my aunt would like. Maybe I’ll give it to her if I can’t find the original owner’s family.” she says, turning from the mirror. She reaches back to unclasp the pendant, her eyes drawn to movement in the doorway. 

One of the shadows stands there, the thick black, cloud-like shape roiling gently. She can’t tell for sure, but she’s almost certain it’s watching her. She decides to ignore it, setting the pendant where it can observe it without being interrupted and going back to look at the other pieces Gendry has uncovered. 

xXx

Arya laughs as she opens a box. 

“What is it?” 

“VHS tapes.” she tells him, pulling one out. Some of them are labeled with the labels from the factory and some of them are handwritten. “Do they even make VHS players anymore?”

“Yeah, we have one down at the station. Though there’s talk about converting evidence tapes to discs.” he tells her, pulling one out and squinting at the label. It’s one of the handwritten ones and the pen ink is severely faded. “Podrick probably has one, bet I could get him to loan it to you.” 

“I kind of want to know what’s on them, they look like they might be home movies.” she says. 

“Well give me a second. Maybe I can pick it up when I go pick up lunch.” 

He does exactly that, and as they make themselves comfortable on the sofa in the living room, Arya pops one of the tapes in. It takes a while for anything to appear on screen and they have to fast forward through the first twenty minutes of the tape before they get anything watchable. 

“What the fuck?” Gendry chokes on his drink, nearly spitting it across the room. Arya nearly doubles over in laughter, turning the volume up, letting a cacophony of groans and moans echo through the first floor. “Porn? Really?” 

“Homemade from the looks of it.” she’s grinning like a fool, finding this all far too amusing. Gendry sighs. 

“Are you going to watch this whole thing?” he asks when she doesn’t make a move to turn it off. 

“Sure, why not? It looks like they put a lot of effort into it. Why let it go to waste?” 

“You’re cracked, you know that?” 

She laughs. 

The tape doesn’t last much longer, the damage to it too great to sustain anymore of the recorded image and before Gendry can stop her, Arya is up and putting in another. Like the first, it too is a homemade porn tape, this one in much better condition, but with the same people. 

“Huh,” Gendry huffs. “I didn’t think the human body could bend that way?” 

“Oh sure, you just gotta limber up.” Arya replies without thinking, a blush tinting her cheeks when she realizes what she’s said. She seems to push away the embarrassment rather quickly though. 

“Is that so?” he asks. 

She grins. “Mhmm.” 

“We should stop watching these.”

“Oh why?” she wines. “Don’t be such a prude.”

“I’m not, but with my luck, we’ll find a snuff film and I’ll have to explain to my colleagues how I came across it. I can just see the look on Jon’s face now.” 

He really shouldn’t find it so cute when she grins like that. Not when it’s at his expense. They skim through three more tapes, one of which is an actual home movie, before they clean up lunch and get back to work.

xXx

“Bloody hell, there’s a bottle of scotch holed up back here.” Arya’s voice is muffled, both by the mask and the fact that she’s facing into the wall. 

“You are definitely not giving that back to anyone.” he insists, standing from the floor and walking over. She straightens with the bottle in hand. “Fuck, that’s three hundred years old.” he says, examining the label. “That’s gotta taste damn good by now.” 

“Save it to celebrate finishing the house?” 

“You're on.” he agrees, handing it back. She sets it aside and goes back to digging through the open wall panel.

xXx

“Alright, the people who lived here were horny fuckers, for sure.” Gendry says suddenly, looking up from the box he’s kneeling over. 

“What is it this time?” 

“Erotica.” he replies, pulling a handful of old paperback books from the box. Considering where they’ve been sitting for gods knows how long, they’re in fairly good condition.” 

Arya wanders over, taking the books and flipping through some of them. “Some of these were banned at one point.” she says. When Gendry doesn’t reply she looks up to find him staring at her. “What?” 

“How do you know that?” 

She grins. “What, a girl can’t like sex?” she asks. 

“It’s actually imperative that a girl likes sex, it’s the only way for a boy to truly enjoy sex, but that’s not what I meant and you know it.” he replies. 

“Your partners are very lucky, Gen.” she tells him, almost offhandedly. “And if you must know, my Aunt Lyanna is a reproductive therapist. She has since retired from practice and now she owns an antique store in Wintertown. She deals in all sorts of things.” she explains. “I worked for her during the summers in medical school. You pick up a lot of obscure history around her.” 

She decides to ignore the flush on his cheeks, figuring she’s teased him enough for the moment. 

xXx

“Okay,” Arya says abruptly that evening, as she comes around the corner into the kitchen. Gendry is removing take away boxes from a paper bag, setting them out on the table in the breakfast nook. He turns to find her striking a pose, a black slouch hat on her head. “Riddle me this copper,” her accent is atrocious, but it brings a smile to his face nonetheless. “Do you feel lucky punk? Do ya?” 

Gendry rolls his eyes. “You are mixing up so many movie genres right now.” he laughs. “And you need to stop putting those clothes on, you have no idea what’s growing on them.” 

Arya waves off his concern, taking the hat off and flinging it out the door and into the adjacent dining room. He doesn’t see where it lands. She slides into one side of the breakfast nook while he takes the other and they divvy up the boxes. 

“Not a bad day's work,” he says. 

“Mm, still some stuff to go through, more of those tapes to watch.” she wiggles her eyebrows at him and he rolls his eyes again, shaking his head. “But yeah, not bad at all. Certainly got through more with your help than I would have alone, so thanks.” 

He shrugs. “It was fun actually. Better than what I was supposed to be doing at work today.” 

“Do you ever hate your job?” Arya asks and Gendry hesitates, stopping to think about it. He’s thought about it quite a lot, actually. He’d gone to school and had assumed he’d end up working in a lab or an office somewhere, but the police academy had never been on his radar, not until his last year of school and a discussion between himself and another classmate. He’d entered the academy a few months after graduation and was inducted within a year. He’d been a cop since he was twenty-three years old and while there were days he wished he could forget, the overall experience of the last seventeen years has been more fulfilling than not. 

He tells her as much. “Sometimes it’s hard. There’s been a few cases where we didn’t get the outcome we wanted, or justice had to be postponed because of a loophole, but all in all I can’t see myself doing anything else.” he pauses. “What about you?” he asks, not entirely sure where the question came from. “Jon said you were a top notch trauma surgeon, now you tend bar, not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you, but… do you miss it?” 

“All the time.” she replies without hesitation. “I’ve wanted to be a doctor for as long as I can remember.” she explains. “It kind of hurts that I can’t do that anymore.” 

“Can’t? Your license is still up to date.” 

She squints at him. “How did you know that?” 

“I was required to do a basic background check, nothing invasive, when you were helping with the King’s Park Case.” 

She seems to accept the answer. “It’s not a matter of legality, so much as confidence. I made a mistake and someone paid for it and despite people telling me that it’s not on me, I feel like it is. So…” she sighs. “You just don’t want a surgeon in the Operating Suite who second guesses their every decision.” 

“Makes sense.” he replies easily enough. “Have you thought about talking to someone?” he continues. “They make us talk to a shrink whenever there’s even the slightest bit of trauma on the job and as much as I hate to admit it, and if you tell anyone I said this I will deny everything, it really helps. It’s nice to talk to someone who doesn’t know you. Someone whose only stake in talking to you is making sure you’re going to be okay.” 

“The thought has occurred to me, and my family has brought it up too. I just… I don’t relish the idea of telling someone about what I can do, because let’s face it, I’m going to have to do that to be completely open and honest with them.” 

He concedes the point and lets it drop when she doesn’t continue. 

xXx

“Okay, one more tape.” Arya grins as he helps her tidy up the boxes they’ve stacked in the dining room. “You know you want to.”

“Arry, come on.” he huffed a laugh, rolling his eyes. “You’re ridiculous, you know that?” 

“I’m aware.” she laughs. “Come on, I’ll make popcorn and we can critique their technique.” 

“That is so wrong.” he guffaws. “On so many levels. Is this what you do for fun? Watch ametuer porn and critique the actors.” 

“Yeah,” she replies. “Beats going out.” 

Gendry hesitates. “Well… I can’t argue with that actually.” 

Her grin widened as she bounces off to the kitchen to make popcorn. 

“I’m going to regret this, I can feel it.” he mutters as she passes him a beer, coming around the sofa. She takes a seat beside him, the bowl of popcorn in her lap. The tape starts and she boos as a home movie starts to play. Gendry laughs, head thrown back against the back of the sofa. “What is wrong with you?” 

She grimaces. “Oh no, don’t open that door.” she tells him, as they devolve into giggles. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!!


End file.
